In the retail industry, the largest expenditures are typically the cost of the goods sold followed closely by the cost of labor. With particular regard to retail industries, e.g., grocery or fast food service, the impetus to reduce labor costs has focused on reducing or eliminating the amount of time required to handle and process the items or goods purchased. To this end, there have been a number of concepts developed for point of sale (POS) terminals and kiosk terminals which attempt to substantially reduce the time required to process a transaction.
POS and kiosk terminals have problems associated with the level of customer experience with the terminals. In particular, a customer typically has little or no training in the operation of the terminal prior to his or her initial use of the terminal. Therefore, one concern that retailers have when evaluating a self-service POS or kiosk terminal is the terminals ability to detect the customer's experience level and provide the proper level of help or guidance.
In addition, both assisted and self-service POS terminals and kiosks often have inefficient user interfaces that slow down the checkout process by requiring numerous inputs from the user to perform a function. Some functions require using one or more drop down menus and require the user to know which menus contain the desired function. The additional inputs and required knowledge of the menus increases the time required to complete a transaction and increases the cost per transaction.
What is needed therefore is an assisted and self-service POS terminal and a kiosk terminal that provides a more intuitive human-computer interface and that further reduces the number of interactions needed to complete a transaction.